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The beginning of any academic year heralds a mix of emotions for students, parents, and teachers alike. However, as I enter my seventh year of teaching in the classroom, I’ve come to terms with a feeling I’ve never experienced before — at least, not with respect to my profession: I am heartbroken.

No, this particular heartbreak is not solely due to my salary (although nationally, we still lag far behind most other states). Nor is it due to the systemic, persistent poverty in which many of my students live (though this, too, is worthy of much more exploration).

Instead, I’m afraid that my relatively brief, intensely impassioned love affair with the teaching profession is nearing its end, as the newly-acquired, newly-required SpringBoard curriculum has become the proverbial straw atop this educator’s back.

In the past several years, I have truly come to love my profession as I have always loved my students, a gradual shift propelled by my discovery and implementation of a Hawaii-grown, “gently” Socratic pedagogy known as Philosophy for Children with my middle-level students.

In my inquiry-based classroom, tears were frequently shed, societal injustices named and deconstructed as my students and I created and maintained a safe space to connect our lived experiences to literary texts.

As a result of this fresh approach to education (which, I might add, is gaining traction throughout the state), my students interacted with a near-constant stream of visitors ranging from UH professors to Japanese educational researchers, all of whom participated wholeheartedly in our inquiries and treated my students as philosophical peers.

Beyond the intellectual atmosphere and seminar-style format, the proverbial proof that this system worked well for my students was evident in the data-driven pudding: Ninety-three percent of my graduating class of eighth graders last year passed the Hawaii State Assessment, up from their 57 percent average two years prior. I was even a state finalist for a national teaching award.

Years of positive momentum came to an abrupt halt, however, when two weeks before my students’ first day of school this year, we were told to toss out years of curriculum development in favor of a bland, one-size-fits-all curriculum called SpringBoard.

Overnight my classroom became something almost unrecognizable to me as I struggled with the process of upending the fundamental principles from which I had carefully crafted my culturally-relevant classroom in favor of a largely top-down mode of instruction. Paulo Freire, the iconic critical pedagogue, would aptly describe this approach as a “banking model” of education, wherein students are viewed as little more than empty receptacles — devoid of their own knowledge and experiences — in need of being filled with specific information that only the teacher possesses. If, as Freire asserts, true education is the practice of freedom, the semi-scripted curriculum offered up by SpringBoard (and the heavy-handed support of the DOE behind it) is nearly the opposite, denying freedom to students, teachers, and administrators who might instead prefer something better.

And I’m not sure what’s worse: the uncomfortable distance I sense between my students and I as we stray further and further away from anything remotely transformational, or the undeniable realization that great teachers across the state, who have worked for years to refine their classroom practices and curricula to best suit the needs of their students, are similarly being told to scrap it all in favor of curricular and pedagogical conformity.

Worth noting is that the SpringBoard curriculum is a product of the College Board, which also houses the Advanced Placement (AP) program and the SAT. Given the DOE’s nominal commitment to “college or career readiness,” it seems reasonable that the department and the College Board are convenient bedfellows. Still, in practice, this pairing amounts to little more than teaching to a test.

In conversations with experienced colleagues, a similar sense of outrage is broadly shared among us, and I am baffled that someone — really, that anyone in the DOE would elect to impose a statewide, mandatory, day-by-day curriculum, especially one as narrowly-conceived and culturally unresponsive as SpringBoard.

In warning against the authoritarian tendency in education, Freire reminds us that “to alienate human beings from their own decision-making is to change them into objects.” Indeed, we are effectively forcing our teachers to leave their individual identities at the classroom door in order to ensure the academic content they impart is uniformly delivered, devoid of passion and experience.

There is currently no shortage of political rhetoric where public education is concerned. But despite the diverse range of positions on education, there is nearly universal support for the importance of critical thinking, reasoned judgment, and nurturing our students’ individual talents and strengths.

Ironically, these pursuits are the very same ones being denied to teachers across the state every day. If we truly believe in the fundamental importance of our children as future leaders in our world, we must empower teachers as leaders in their own right. And empowerment begins with allowing us the space to design the learning experiences that we, with our specialized understanding of our students, schools, and communities, know will most positively impact our students.

Jessica Masterson serves as the head of the English department at Aiea Intermediate School and teaches students in grades seven and eight.

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